Tech News

Microsoft appears to be readying a special Fortnite-style version of the company’s Xbox One S console. WinFuture reports that Microsoft will release a purple edition of the Xbox One S in the coming weeks, in a bundle designed for Fortnite fans. The Xbox One S Fortnite Limited Edition will reportedly include a new “Dark Vertex” skin and 2000 V-Bucks in-game currency. The bundle is also said to include a month of Xbox Live Gold, EA Access, and Xbox Game Pass.

It’s not clear exactly when Microsoft will announce this new color variant, but it’s rumored to debut at $299 with 1TB of storage and the Blu-ray optical drive. This certainly isn’t the first time Microsoft has customized an Xbox One S console for a game. Microsoft created a special...

Brian Krebs has revealed that a company that primarily works in real estate insurance has left as many as 885 million records exposed on its website — going back to 2003. First American Financial Corp’s big mistake should have been obvious to anybody who would have given a second thought to security. If you had the URL for any document on its website, you could simply add or subtract one to a number in the URL to access another document.

Given the type of business this company is in, those records include incredibly private information. Krebs spoke with Ben Shoval, who brought the exposure to his attention and who says the documents potentially included “Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, account statements, and even internal...

Snap is in talks with Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group to license songs for users to embed in posts, according to aWall Street Journalreport. The deal would give users access to a broad catalog of songs to post on Snapchat, much like the features available for Instagram Stories and TikTok.

The licensing deal would come at a time when tech companies are increasingly leaning into music features as a core part of their offerings. The popularity of these videos has allowed social media platforms to launch hit songs — Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which has been the number one song on the Billboard Top 100 for several weeks, first gained popularity through TikTok as a meme.

By all accounts, the OnePlus 7 Pro is the nicest phone released by the company yet — with a higher price that reflects as much. But some early buyers are reporting that they’ve noticed phantom screen presses, where apps are responding as if something on the screen had been tapped even when the phone is sitting idle.

OnePlus is aware of the issue, according to Android Police, and says it’s treating it as a high priority after managing to successfully reproduce the problem. If you just bought this phone, you’re no doubt hoping that the phantom taps are something that can be eliminated through a software update and aren’t indicative of a deeper hardware dilemma. The OnePlus 7 Pro has a first-of-its-kind OLED screen with a refresh rate of...

To those outside of YouTube, Social Blade is just another analytics site that tracks subscriber growth or loss. But it’s not. Social Blade has become a crucial component to being a YouTube creator, providing creators with numbers to prove why they matter as a community.

Now, Social Blade’s time might be up. YouTube’s product team is introducing a change to the platform in August that will hide live subscriber counts. The change will affect third-party sites that use YouTube’s API to render their data, including Social Blade. Dozens of YouTube channels dedicated to live-streaming subscriber battles (like T-Series versus PewDiePie) will no longer work because they won’t have access to Social Blade’s data counter. Social Blade was the first...

Swedish music hardware company Teenage Engineering has developed a cult following around their design-forward synthesizers. Now it’s expanded into another portion of the music industry and launched a record label. Naturally called Teenage Engineering Records, the company says the label only has two rules for releases: “it needs to be a good song,” and the song must use at least one Teenage Engineering instrument.

The label’s first release is “You’re In Love with Your Hair” by newcomer Swedish artist Emil Lennstrand, otherwise known as Buster. This appears to be his first release ever, and Teenage Engineering says he’s currently finishing up a bunch of songs that will be released in the near future. “You’re In Love with Your Hair” was...

Amazon can’t seem to decide whether it wants its own mini-stores inside shopping malls. After the company decided earlier this year to close the many kiosks it had maintained at malls, a few new ones have sprung up. As Business Insider notes, Amazon’s revamped mall presence is being called “Presented by Amazon.”

Unlike the previous mall kiosks, which were showcases for Amazon’s Echo, Kindle e-readers, Fire TV, and other first-party hardware, this new approach offers “a themed selection of top brands, frequently updated and presented to you by Amazon.” So, as with its Amazon 4-star retail stores, it sounds like the selection at Presented by Amazon will be rotated out on a regular basis — and it won’t be limited to Amazon’s own products.

Thor: Ragnarokdirector Taika Waititi’s next big-budget project, a live-action version of the beloved manga series Akira, finally has a release date, The Wrap reports: May 21st, 2021.

Waititi’s project, which is being distributed by Warner Bros., was first announced in 2017. The announcement came just before Waititi’s first major blockbuster film, Thor: Ragnarok,was released. Although Waititi built up a cult-like fan base around himself thanks to movies like What We Do in the Shadowsand Eagle vs Shark, the Akira announcement made longtime fans of the manga series — and the critically acclaimed 1988 anime adaptation — nervous. Waititi told Dazed magazine in April 2018 that he was more than aware of the concern.

CrossFit, the branded workout regimen, deleted its Facebook and Instagram pages earlier this week and explained the reasoning through an impassioned press release. The announcement lists various reasons for the indefinite suspension of its accounts, including accusations that Facebook’s News Feeds are “censored and crafted to reflect the political leanings of Facebook’s utopian socialists.”

The issue stemmed from the deletion of a South Africa-based Facebook group, Banting 7 Day Meal Plans, which the company says happened without warning or explanation. The group, which is unrelated to CrossFit but has 1.6 million members espousing the benefits of a low-carb, high-fat diet like CrossFit’s recommended nutritional regimen, has since been...

Hulu has ordered a new horror anthology series based on Nathan Ballingrud’s short-story collection North American Lake Monsters, according to Deadline. It’ll be produced by Babak Anvari and Lucan Toh, the creative team behind the horror film Wounds, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January. They’re already familiar with Ballingrud’s work: Wounds is based on another Ballingrud story, The Visible Filth. Anvari wrote and directed the movie, and Toh was one of the producers. The film stars Dakota Johnson, Armie Hammer, and Zazie Beetz.

The North American Lake Monsters series is planned as an eight-episode season, produced by Mary Laws, who produced AMC’s Preacher and co-wrote Nicolas Winding Refn’s film The Neon Demon. Hulu...